The Texan's Secret Son
Автор
Kit Hawthorne
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CHAPTER ONE
“ANY LUCK?” Eliana called from the other side of the dressing-room curtain.
Marcos grunted in reply. He felt like he was fourteen again and any second now his mother would come barging in and start pointing out everything that was wrong with what he was trying on. Eliana even sounded like their mom, all cheerful and bossy.
“Come out so I can see,” she said. “There’s a three-way mirror out here.”
“You don’t need to see,” said Marcos. “They’re fine.”
The curtain whooshed back, and his sister burst in.
“Hey!” Marcos said. “A little privacy here?”
“Oh, relax. I heard you zip the zipper.”
Then her face got all focused. She looked him over and said, “No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean those jeans are wrong for you.”
“They fit fine.”
“The cut is wrong. You need a roomier thigh.”
“Are you saying these jeans make me look fat?”
“I’m saying you’re too buff for them, Marcos. I’m saying that on your body type, straight-leg jeans look like skinny jeans.”
He checked himself out in the mirror again. Hmm. Maybe she had a point. Marcos had been wearing mostly uniforms for the past twelve years, and there might be some things about men’s fashion he’d missed.
But he wasn’t about to learn from his six-years-younger baby sister. He’d been driving a tractor on the ranch while she was still rolling around on the floor with her stuffed bunny. He’d taught her to tie her shoes. She was supposed to look up to him, not order him around like some little kid.
Eliana frowned. “Although...you are thinner than when I saw you last. Like ten to fifteen pounds’ worth, I’d say.”
He shrugged. It had been more like twenty, but he was slowly gaining it back.
“Still,” she went on, “your quads are too big for this cut. You need to try a regular and a relaxed in classic wash.”
“These are good enough, Ana. I’m not gonna go back out there and root around for regular this and relaxed that.”
She handed him something folded and denim. “Well, lucky for you I already did. Now try them on. Both pairs.”
They had a brief staring contest before Marcos took the jeans and said again, “Little privacy, here?”
Eliana went out and pulled the curtain shut, but not before Marcos saw that tiny triumphant smile.
He took off the straight-legs and pulled on one of the others, grumbling to himself. His last day off before the start of mandatory overtime at the factory, and how was he spending it? Shopping. For clothes. There was nothing wrong with the clothes he had. But Eliana always got her way. Part of it was bossiness, part of it was charm and part of it was bribing him with dinner.
Eliana stuck a green shirt past the curtain and waved it at him.
“Just look at this color, Marcos! It would be fabulous on you. Really bring out the green in your eyes.”
“My eyes are brown.”
“They’re hazel. Brown on the outside, green on the inside.”
Wow. She was correcting him on his eye color now?
“It’s too bright,” he said. “I’d look like a tree frog.”
“It is not! It’s a lovely rich shade and it would suit you perfectly. Just try it.”
He snatched the shirt out of her hand and pitched it onto the floor.
Ever since Marcos had come back home, Eliana had felt like a stranger to him. She’d been so young when he enlisted, just fourteen. Still complaining about algebra and wearing sparkly stuff on her face and dotting the I in her name with a little flower. Now she was this elegant, confident woman with perfectly manicured nails and an unending stream of sophisticated boyfriends with names like Julian.
Of course, she’d always been pretty—the kind of pretty that attracted guys in droves. His other sister, Dalia, was pretty too, but she had a way about her that kept guys at a distance, and anyway she’d only ever had eyes for one guy, who was now her husband. So high school had been pretty straightforward for her, romancewise. Eliana was a whole ʼnother story. But by the time she started high school, Marcos was gone, serving his country. From what he heard, he’d missed a lot of drama.
Huh, these jeans really did look better on him.
Yeah, and a lot of good that would do him in the days and weeks to come as he stood at his station in the factory, doing the same thing over and over, hour after hour, shift after shift, with nothing to make one minute any different from the next except the company of his asinine coworkers. They were such morons, with their lame private jokes and constant complaining about having to work for a living. At the end of the shift, they liked to go out for drinks together, as if eight hours in each other’s company wasn’t more than enough. They never asked Marcos to join them. Not that he wanted to, but it would’ve been nice to be asked so he could say no. They all looked at him like he was some kind of freak, like they were waiting for him to explode.
He hated that job—but it was the only one he’d been able to land since his discharge from the Marines.
He changed into his own jeans, picked up the pile of jeans and the green shirt and stalked out of the dressing room. He tossed all but one pair of jeans toward the discard rack.
Eliana gave a longing look at the green shirt, but perked up when she saw the jeans he was holding on to. “You’re getting them? You’re actually taking my advice?”
“Oh, are these one of the ones you brought me? Yeah, they’re okay.”
He couldn’t let baby sister think she knew too much. It would set a bad precedent.
She rolled her eyes.
“You need to be more deliberate about this whole thing, Marcos. You need to learn to dress for both your body type and your fashion style.”
“I don’t have a fashion style.”
“Of course you do. You are the rebel type. You’ve got that whole brooding bad-boy thing going on. It’s a good look for you. But you have to be careful not to overdo it, or you’ll just look like a criminal.”
“I don’t look like a criminal. I don’t even have any ink.”
“But you repel people with your glowering silence and overall demeanor. And then there’s your hair.”
“What about my hair?”
“What about it? You barely have any! You need to let it grow. It’s been ten weeks since you were discharged and still it’s barely more than a quarter-inch long on top and nothing but scalp on the sides.”
“High and tight. That’s how I like it.”
“It makes you look unapproachable.”
“Good.”
“And you have such nice hair too! So glossy and thick with that hint of curl. I’d like to see you try an undercut, or maybe a less extreme fade that’s longer overall. What you have now looks like no guard at all, or maybe number-one guard. What if you tried a number eight on top, fading to a three or maybe a two? Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“I don’t know how you even know so much about men’s haircuts and clipper-guard sizes, but an eight is way too long. I’d look like a hippie.”
“Hippie? We’re talking about one inch of hair!”
“Not doing it.”
She sighed hard. “Oh, Steve. You’re so stubborn.”
The old nickname almost made Marcos smile. It had been a long time since anyone called him Steve.
In the end, he bought two pairs of regular-cut jeans and some new black T-shirts, a whole stack identical to each other and to the black T-shirts he already owned. Eliana didn’t say anything, but he could feel her fuming all the way to the parking lot.
But she cheered up once they got in her car.
“I hope you’re hungry,” she said. “I’m starving.”
Right on cue, his stomach let out a loud growl.
She laughed at that, and for a second she looked like the Eliana he used to know. He even smiled a little himself.
Then she took out her phone and started texting.
“Who’re you talking to? Is it that guy Julian or whatever?”
Eliana didn’t even look up. “His name is Nigel, and no, it’s not him. That’s over.”
“Over? Since when? You were just telling me about him yesterday.”
“I broke it off this morning.”
She didn’t look upset, but maybe there was more to the story. There had to be. This was just a brave front.
“What did he do? Do I need to pay him a visit?”
She smiled but didn’t look up from her phone. “Aw, Steve, that’s so sweet. But unnecessary. Nigel didn’t do anything terrible. He just wasn’t very mature.”
She put her phone away and started the car.
“Well, who’d you text, then?”
“Dalia. To tell her we’re going to be late.”
Marcos snorted. “She knows you’re going to be late. You’re always late.”
“I am not! Anyway, I wanted her to be on the lookout for my friend who’s joining us.”
“A new boyfriend? That was fast, even for you.”
“No! Just a friend.”
Marcos smelled a rat. “Are you trying to set me up?”
She looked at him, horrified. “Of course not! I said this was a friend, didn’t I?”
She was perfectly serious. He could see it in her eyes. He actually laughed. “All right. Good.”
And then it hit him.
“Waaait a minute. It’s your friend from that place, isn’t it? That clinic you want me to go to, that quack shack.”
“It isn’t a clinic. It’s a resource center for veterans.”
“I don’t need any help. I’m not broken.”
“Nobody said you were broken. But there’s nothing wrong with accepting help when it’s offered. It’s not a sign of weakness.”
“Is this why you wanted to drive me in your car and not take separate vehicles? Because you knew if I had my truck I’d bail.”
She gave him that sweet look of hers, with her chin tucked low and her eyebrows raised.
“All you have to do is meet her,” she said.
“Aha! So it is a she!”
“Oh my gosh, you are so paranoid. Relax. I told you, I’m not trying to set you up. She’s married with a kid, okay? They’re new in the area and want to meet people.”
“Well, I’m not buddying up to her.”
“I don’t expect you to. That’s what the rest of the family will be there for. You can sit there as silent as a tree stump for all I care. All you have to do is eat.”
His stomach growled again. Something was gnawing away in there, right in that spot midway between his belly button and his breastbone.
He hoped that thing would settle down and cooperate.
